Background: Anxiety is the commonest problems before surgery. Preoperative anxiety not only causes pain and many suffering for children, but also has a negative impact on the recovery after surgery and probably later than that. Selecting a low risk and cost-effective way to control children's anxiety before surgery seems necessary. Aim: Influence of the puppet Kolah Ghermezi on preoperative anx...

Humans are extraordinarily prosocial, and research conducted primarily in North America indicates that giving to others is emotionally rewarding. To examine whether the hedonic benefits of giving represent a universal feature of human behavior, we extended upon previous cross-cultural examinations by investigating whether inhabitants of a small-scale, rural, and isolated village in Vanuatu, whe...

We provide a cognitive analysis of how children represent belief using mental files. We explain why children who pass the false belief test are not aware of the intensionality of belief. Fifty-one 3½- to 7-year old children were familiarized with a dual object, e.g., a ball that rattles and is described as a rattle. They observed how a puppet agent witnessed the ball being put into box 1. In th...

Cooperation can be maintained if individuals reciprocate favors over repeated interactions. However, it is not known when during development the psychological capacities to engage in contingent reciprocation emerge. Therefore, we tested when children begin to differentiate between reciprocal and nonreciprocal interactions in their resource sharing. We compared the sharing behavior of 3- and 5-y...

When children evaluate evidence and make causal inferences, they are sensitive to the social context in which data are generated. This study investigated whether children learn more from evidence generated by an agent who agrees with them or from one who disagrees with them. Children in two age groups (5- and 6-year-olds and 9- and 10-year-olds) observed the functioning of a machine that lit up...

Here we investigate the extent of children's understanding of the joint commitments inherent in joint activities. Three-year-old children either made a joint commitment to assemble a puzzle with a puppet partner, or else the child and puppet each assembled their own puzzle. Afterwards, children who had made the joint commitment were more likely to stop and wait for their partner on their way to...

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 24 young adults during a recognition test including Old, New, and Recombined pairs composed of two words studied in different pairs. Recombined pairs called for a response of 'new'. Task difficulty was increased by repetition of some words during the study phase; a subject might study tower/pie, puppet/pie, drill/wreath and bee/wreath (pa...

An important, and perhaps uniquely human, mechanism for maintaining cooperation against free riders is third-party punishment. Our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, will not punish third parties even though they will do so when personally affected. Until recently, little attention has been paid to how punishment and a sense of justice develop in children. Children respond to norm violation...